It’s been in the news over the last year or so, but “the world’s longest aircraft” has been having test flights in the UK. It’s basically a big balloon with propellers – not entirely unlike a Zeppelin.
Well, on it’s second test flight it crash-landed. I love the euphemistic language they have used for that:
The flight went really well and the only issue was when it landed.
So that’s all right, then.
No one was hurt, which is why I’m making a joke out of it.
Imagine this. You’re competing at the Olympics. You’ve won a few gold medals and you’ve left the Olympic Village to have a few drinks with your team mates one night. You end up pissed out of your skull – or at least pissed out of it enough to allegedly do a bit of vandalism and pee up the wall behind the petrol station you ended up in. You forgot you were in a country where security guards carry guns, even though you come from one where anyone above the age of five is allowed to, and when stopped at gunpoint and told to pay for the damage you opted for an alternative solution.
The alternative you chose was to claim you were robbed at gunpoint and add some stuff that made you out to be Rambo. However, you were too dumb to consider the possibility that CCTV might be operating in the store where it allegedly happened. After changing your story several times, the CCTV was seen and you were identified as the cowardly liar you really are.
Lochte managed to escape back to the States after his false claim. Bentz and Conger had almost made it when they were removed from their flight by police. Feigen has ended up agreeing to pay around $11,000 to a Brazilian charity so that all charges can be dropped. The full story is somewhat confused and Feigen, at least, appears totally innocent. Lochte would appear to be the least innocent.
True American Heroes they ain’t. And at least one of them should be stripped of any medals he won. He’s already lost a lot of his sponsorship.
If Lochte and his gang of masterminds represent one stagnant pool of humanity, their actions certainly have highlighted another.
Most of America is appalled by what they did. Unfortunately, some of these “appalled” Americans don’t have a limiter on the pendulum which determines how they feel about something, and they allow it to swing freely from one absolute extreme to the other.
The simple truth is that Lochte and co. are merely a bunch of over-privileged assholes. That’s all there is to it. But this is the internet age, and things are never that simple when there is a whole heap of conspiracy theories to run with. Therefore, the events in Rio have stirred up the usual crowd of web loonies.
Loony #1 – Tariq Nasheed tweets:
If Black athletes pulled that… stunt, the headlines would read “Black Lives Matter Thugs Caused Terror At The Olympics”
Loony #2 – WendyBrandes tweets:
If Ryan Lochte lied about that robbery, how can we ever believe any man’s allegations of robbery?
I reckon that second one is a certifiably insane man-hater (I admit I’m reading into it with “man-hater”).
On a related note involving a different story, Ellen DeGeneres posted a tweet a few days ago showing herself piggybacking with Usain Bolt, with the comment:
This is how I’m running errands from now on.
Ms DeGeneres, who I have always liked and still admire, is married to another woman, and is probably all too aware of the problems that come with prejudice. I don’t think for a second that she was referring to anything other than Bolt’s speed but I seem to be in a minority on that. You see, American historical media libraries contain numerous images from the 19th and early 20th centuries of white people sitting on the backs of black servants and slaves. Many images simply show white children sitting on the backs of black servants playing “horsey”, though there are some unsettling ones of adults treating black people as furniture. The net loonies have drawn an immediate parallel and pilloried Ms DeGeneres.
But Ellen DeGeneres couldn’t win on this. If she’d have posted a picture of Usain Bolt riding on her back, these lunatics would accuse her of parodying those archive images.
A few months ago, Ms DeGeneres got caught up in a similar fiasco when she collaborated with clothing firm Gap. The advertisement had a simple and innocent photograph of four children, and yet the net loonies managed to read into it and declare it “racist”. Why? Simply because a taller white girl was apparently resting her arm on the head of a smaller (and younger) black child. The loonies had a field day over that – even the fact that the black child was shorter than the white one was somehow “racist”. No one mentioned that by the same token it was also sexist, since it showed four white girls (or possibly three and one boy). The loonies reckoned it was “passive racism” (their new Big Phrase). I charge – with my tongue in my cheek – that is was “active sexism”.
Although it is ugly and wrong, racism is something which on the whole just happens – it isn’t calculated and constructed like a complex machine, and to suggest that a company like Gap (or Ellen DeGeneres, who has had to endure prejudice herself). Most racists couldn’t explain the mechanisms involved in their prejudice if they tried (which is probably why “passive” is used to describe it). Most would have trouble writing their name, though they could probably just about manage to put an “X” in the “Leave” box on a voting form.
But that’s a different subject.
I saw this in the newsfeeds today. It’s in The Sun, which loves this kind of “shocking” story, but it raises a few questions.
Emily Higgins was out at a nightclub in the West Midlands and had apparently done what many young people do when they’re out in nightclubs in the West Midlands. She got pissed, then started a slanging match with bouncers. But this is the Facebook age, remember, and someone with time on their hands (and 16,000 followers) videoed the altercation and published it on social media. Quite why he chose to do this is a bit of a mystery if you don’t automatically think “tosser”.
Ms Higgins is due to start teaching year two at St Gregory’s Catholic Primary School in Bearwood in a few weeks, and inevitably in such a small area one of the followers of the film taker was a parent of one of the kids at the school, and recognised Ms Higgins. Word spread – or rather, shit was thrown – and as far as Ms Higgins is concerned it has now hit the fan.
One of the funniest bits is from a parent who “wished to remain anonymous”. Yeah, I’ll bet she does.
I was completely shocked when I saw the video and recognised her immediately.
I know that parents in our community have been shocked and disgusted by her behaviour.
Bearwood is part of Smethwick, and is just a few km from Birmingham city centre. The streets around the school are primarily small terraced houses. In spite of that, the above quote suggests that the occupants are angels straight out of Heaven who simply use Bearwood as a summer address. In reality, I would suggest that what Ms Higgins has done in her own time – and which didn’t involve the police, from the reports – is no worse than what many of these “shocked” parents get up to (either now, or in the past).
And how many teachers out there have gotten themselves drunk and done something stupid and/or embarrassing? As long as they don’t do it in front of the kids, or have it affect their work, it doesn’t matter.
The only reason THIS has been put in front of the kids is because of the berk with the camera and his Facebook fetish. He could have written about it, but what he has done is bordering on an invasion of privacy since it doesn’t place things in context but it does identify people in such a way that their entire career could be destroyed.
Emily Higgins is likely to lose her job over this, and being a teacher it would also be the end of her career. Is a drunken argument with bouncers – something which happens a hundred times every weekend – really bad enough to warrant that?
Someone accessed this story recently (February 2017). I’d forgotten about it, but a quick check of the staff list on the St Gregory’s website doesn’t show Emily Higgins as one of them.
Poor girl. The screeching harridans of the terraces nearby got their pounds of flesh.
I saw this in the news yesterday, and naturally the BBC is on it like a starving Chihuahua on a pork chop. Apparently, women who return to work part-time after having children earn less than men who don’t. Also, the women miss out on promotions and gain less experience. according to shock “studies”.
Obviously, this statement of the blindingly obvious is wrong, because the law says that women must be promoted ahead of men wherever possible, and companies who choose the most able candidate instead of a female – where the two options deviate – are committing a heinous criminal offence. Likewise, companies who insist of acting logically based on the current space-time continuum and who choose to employ people based on the experience they actually have rather than the experience they might have gained if they hadn’t gone AWOL for a year (and intermittently when they return if the child-minder phones up and says that junior is crying). And absolutely no concern should be raised over the likelihood of them doing the whole thing at least twice more over the next 3-4 years, no matter how important the company’s expansion from simple start up into the international market is.
It’s funny, but I have male pupils who have trouble getting time off for driving lessons and tests even if they’re dead. The females seem to have very little trouble.
I wonder if anyone is ever going to realise that unless you officially declare men to be inferior members of society, women – who, by dint of nature, have to do/experience things which are absolutely counter to what is required in a successful business – are going to be scored accordingly. Of course, when I use the terms “men” and “women” I am referring to the groups generally – there are some women who can do some things men normally excel at much better, just as there are men who can do things that women normally excel at much better. However, if nothing else, the “just being available for work” skill is pretty much lacking when childbirth comes into it. The “not having the experience” and “missing promotions” cards fall naturally out of that, and the only way many women get promoted is simply by being women. Because the Law is on their side on that.
Equal rights is one thing. Forced balance (i.e. positive discrimination) is another matter entirely.
In the workplace, people who do the same job, for the same number of actual hours, and with the same commitment should be paid the same. Someone who does the job part time in order to bring up a family can only expect pro rata at absolute best. And by pro rata, I mean when all the fringe benefits not given to anyone else are taken into account. When you add all that up, there can never be a line right down the middle where all men and all women are earning the same and getting the same opportunities without artificial adjustment.
(Note: the image I’ve used in this article came from a real 60s advert in America. The company was Alcoa Aluminum, to which someone has added that last line in brackets. The funny thing is – and everyone forgets this – before technology advanced, most woman (and a lot of men) would have had trouble getting a ketchup lid off, so the advert wasn’t quite as overtly sexist as it appears today.)
About a month ago I wrote about crap parents who can’t (or won’t) control their kids, with the result that everyone else has to suffer. I mentioned how other crap parents rise up against anyone who objects, citing all manner of illnesses and disorders as possible causes of unruly behaviour, even though we all know that – in the vast majority of cases – it is just crap parenting.
Coincidentally, I was driving between lessons yesterday when movement out of the corner of my eye at lights drew my attention to a passing bus, A woman was lifting a baby/young child in the air – well, I say “child”; actually it was just a huge mouth with tears squirting out of one end and legs dangling out of a nappy the other. I could just imagine the mega-decibel buzzsaw bawling everyone else was having to endure, and I remember thinking “God help anyone who is on that bus”.
Then I saw this story on the BBC website. When you strip it down, it’s just another example of some dipshit who isn’t in contact with reality ranting on Facebook and having it go viral as a result of huge support from a load of other dipshits.
It all starts with a flight from Ibiza to Manchester.
Imagine the situation. You’ve had a nice holiday, but you’re going home in the morning. It was a package tour, so your departure flight officially takes off at something like 5.30am. Your hotel or chalet is at least an hour away from the airport, and you’ve been given strict instructions to be in the car park outside at 3am to board the bus to take you to there. You’re in Ibiza and you’re flying back to Manchester, so there’s a good chance you’ve had to put up with some teenaged yobs for the whole week. Naturally, they will have gone out last night and drunk more than they’d done on any other night. Consequently, at 3am you’ll be sitting on the bus going nowhere while the reps try to find them – at least one will be borderline comatose, and several will be puking up everywhere.
When they eventually do arrive their mouths will be turned up to 11 (the usual yob setting is 9 even when they’re being quiet). The reps will have faces like thunder – quite the opposite of their cheery bonhomie when you were freighted in last week, and you’re now going to have to put up with the loud yobs all the way to the airport (and at the airport, and all the way home). Once you get there, you will have to wait until check-in begins and the couple of dozen seats – totally inadequate for the 200 people milling around at the best of times – will be taken up by a handful of sleeping backpackers. The floor will be covered in sleeping, puking, and screaming humanity, so you’ll have to be careful not to tread on anyone.
Any cafes will be shut, even if your departure hub (i.e. shed) has any, and the vending machines will have been emptied by more yobs providing the traditional Coca Cola and crisps breakfast for their kids. When the check-in call finally comes, all the backpackers and yobs will somehow make it to the front of the queue. The check-in process will take over an hour instead of the usual 10 minutes because the Spanish authorities’ approach to an increased terrorism threat is to use half as many people to do six times as much work. Once through, none of the duty free shops will be open so you’ll have to kill the next 30 minutes watching the planes land.
An hour later, and some 30 minutes after the time you were scheduled to take off, you’ll suddenly realise your plane isn’t even here yet. Eventually, you will casually watch it come in, land, taxi over, disgorge the new intake of holidaymakers and their luggage, get loaded up with your luggage, and refuel. Somewhere around 8am you’ll flop into your seat, simultaneously smashing both buttocks on the arm rests as you do, and then spend a further 30 minutes being jostled by all the other passengers, who appear transfixed by the overhead storage compartments and that clunk-click noise they make, and block the gangway for everyone else instead of bloody sitting down.
You’ll finally take off, knowing that you have two and a half hours in the air plus any time for stop offs. Within five minutes you’ll start to get cramp as a result of the non-existent leg room, and develop breathing problems as you sit with folded arms to try and keep out of the personal space of the person next to you, who is twice as wide as the seat they’ve been given and who has no qualms at all about occupying both yours and their personal space all at the same time. If you’re lucky, the pissed yobs from your hotel will burn out, and the need for an emergency diversion to the Galapagos will be avoided.
The first $64,000 question is this. After all of the above, if someone has a screaming kid which just will not shut up sitting immediately behind you, are you going to smile and ignore it, or get angrier and angrier inside?
The second $64,000 question is: will you blow?
Well, it would appear that on the flight referred to in the story, someone did get angry and blow – if “blow” is the right word to use. When bombarded with the incessant and painful noise coming from a screaming child on a cramped and lengthy journey back to Manchester, a female passenger in the seat immediately in front (from what I can gather) shouted “shut that child up”.
I can absolutely sympathise with her.
But we are in the Facebook age, and nothing is ever that simple. The mother has taken to social media to effectively blame the irate passenger for the behaviour of her child, saying that the kid was having “a meltdown” and that the comment “didn’t help” the child’s anxiety levels. “Meltdown” and “anxiety levels” are the favoured phrases of parents who can’t control their offspring, even though it is they who usually created the environment for such behaviour in the first place. Another favoured ploy is to blame some sort of illness.
In this case, the child apparently suffered from a rare condition called Sturge-Weber syndrome, and naturally her behaviour on the plane was – according to the mother’s implied words – entirely and completely due to all the bad things that go along with that condition. The possibility that she was just acting up because of the early start and all the arseing around at 3am in Spain didn’t enter into it. On the other hand, Sturge-Weber can have some nasty symptoms, though if these were genuinely the cause of any such behaviour you’d have to ask why the child had been taken to Ibiza in the first place (she has a huge port-wine stain on her face, and my understanding is that you should avoid the sun if you have one), and why she’d gone economy (where even a full-grown adult might feel like having “a meltdown” and suffer “anxiety”).
Of course, barring any law which forbids it, the child’s parents had every right to take her to Ibiza in this manner. But then, other people – the majority, in fact – have rights too, one of which is to be able to sit quietly without someone else’s kids bawling in your ear and ruining something you probably paid a lot of money for.
So, it isn’t as one-sided as the mother with her Facebook rant would like to think.
I mean, we know that the Paralympics begins when the current ones end, but when does the one where we acknowledge that men can win medals start?
For the last week and half the BBC has been talking up every medal won by a female at the expense of those won by men – except in cases where there was no female equivalent or “alternative lifestyle” card to fall back on. Not just those won by British athletes, but overseas ones as well. They had the most pointless tagline I’ve ever seen in “Why Simone Manuel’s Olympic gold medal in swimming matters” in response to a female black swimmer breaking a world record (actually, her medal only matters inasmuch as it is a gold medal and it is not the political watershed they are suggesting).
Today, they went too far, with “Support as China’s Fu Yuanhui breaks period taboo” – a story about a Chinese swimmer who became “an overnight sensation” for competing while having her period. In actual fact, her period resulted in her under-performing, and she was apparently in agony afterwards (pain is rarely a good sign, extreme pain even less so). But it hasn’t stopped calls for “more research” into the issue. Quite frankly, I can’t help wonder why this has not been more of a problem before. But then again, when your hormones are being controlled by a state physician – which history suggests has often been the case, and not just in China – and the big question is what sex you belong to, periods don’t enter into it. To be honest, it’s not much different to allowing babies into swimming pools, and carries similar questions about health and sanitation.
Then there was the Daily Mail, who published a story last month about a teenager who’d been picked to represent Britain at skeet shooting. The girl in question is already a dab hand at promoting herself on social media, and the Mail includes a large handful of stereotypical selfies (complete with pouting and enlarged eyes). She’d gone so far as to show that she was a “girly girl” (her own words) by having pink shotgun cartridges made with her name on them in gold (the Mail identifies this as “adding a feminine touch to the sport”). In a follow up story yesterday, the Mail reports on how she failed to win a medal, along with a photo of her in an evening dress, high heels, and her shotgun over her shoulder outside some stately home.
Don’t get me wrong. Anyone who wins a medal – or even competes – at the Olympics really deserves admiration. But turning it into something it isn’t just ruins the whole thing, especially when it’s a feminist or political agenda that’s being pushed.
This news report on the BBC website reports that he government is to “guarantee post-EU funds”. People shouldn’t get too excited, though that is naturally going to be very difficult for the average Brexiter, who will probably orgasm when they read it.
It turns out that the EU is funding somewhere close to £4.5bn per year in the UK.
Now, just a reminder here, but apart from being able to set fire to anyone suspected of being an immigrant and ethnically cleansing the British Isles, the second major rallying call of the Brexit camp and its troglodyte supporters was that we would save £350m by not having to pay our annual membership subs to the EU. All of that money was allegedly going to go to the NHS.
This next part is completely beyond the understanding of any Brexiter, but £4.5bn is more than TEN TIMES BIGGER than £350m. And at no point did ANYONE (except me, who has mentioned it several times) even consider the loss of EU funding and its wider effects.
Since Brexit was unexpected, no contingency had been considered for the loss of funding, and it is only now that we come to it. The report says that the Treasury will cover all funding which has already been granted, and all agricultural funding up until 2020. Ironically, UK companies can still apply for EU funding while the UK is still a member, though any grants would not be covered by the Treasury if we subsequently left.
A few idiots – one of whom is the President of the Royal Society – have “welcomed” the plan, instead of opposing Brexit. Fortunately, Scotland is still playing with a full deck, and the Finance Secretary has said:
[the announcement]…”falls far short” of what is needed… A limited guarantee for some schemes for a few short years leaves Scotland hundreds of millions of pounds short of what we would receive as members of the EU.
Yes. And that applies to Northern Ireland, Wales, and England. Why can’t people see that unless we keep up the funding, it will be a disaster when it ends – and here’s another thing you heard from me first: when it ends, like it will have to, it may well be in the middle of a catastrophic recession borne out of Brexit.
Trying to pay grants and subsidies by pretending we’re still in the EU has a much better modus operandi – STAY IN THE EU FOR REAL.
While we’re on the subject, this is the closing GBP vs USD price this week.
We’re at $1.29 – almost a new low – and unless the report above is designed to hold it steady and it works, when the markets open again on Monday the trend is clearly downwards. All those minor rises since Brexit have occurred as a result of various attempts to hold the GBP steady, and all have only worked for a short time because the overwhelming force is down.
I think we’ll see a slight recovery on Monday as a result of this announcement. But how long for is anyone’s guess.
WE ARE BETTER OFF IN THE EU THAN OUT OF IT.
Oh, and I almost forgot. Where is this extra £4.5bn going to come from? Who will suffer as a result?
I’ve just opened this month’s copy of Intelligent Instructor and one of the feature stories concerns the public consultation on proposed changes to the driving test.
One highlighted comment caught my eye. It comes from David Davies of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS). He says:
No one gets killed making a three-point turn in a cul-de-sac
What an idiot! He – and all of his colleagues who are hell bent on feminising and dumbing down the driving test in order to get a higher pass rate – seem incapable of understanding that the skills needed to do a three-point turn (or turn in the road as it is officially known) are critical for avoiding situations where one does stand a higher risk of “being killed”.
To start with, attitude is the number one factor in most accidents, closely followed by inexperience. When 17-year old Wayne overshoots his turn for McDonalds at 1am on a Saturday night as he, Kyle, Jack, and Liam decide to go and stock up on some litter to strew all over the local retail park, he is going to want to turn around. I can assure you that if I was anywhere within a 2-mile radius of Wayne at that point, I would rather that he at least knew how to turn around properly – and that my life wasn’t being traded solely against his attitude.
Do you get that, David Davies? It’s the difference between some juvenile delinquent having the right skills and the wrong attitude versus him having no skills at all and the wrong attitude. Your job is to uphold the skills part-not to get rid of it so you can pretend you upped the test pass rate by not asking them to do something they find hard.
Removing manoeuvres from the existing driving test and replacing them with baby-exercises is going to lead to more deaths – if it has any discernible effect at all. It is certainly not going to cut deaths.
That’s right. One of them is in colour.
The farcical American Presidential Election campaign hit a new low today. Donald Trump has made what is seen as a reference to the assassination of Hillary Clinton.
Even if he didn’t literally mean what he said, there are plenty of loonies in the US who would see things differently.
While reading that BBC story, my eye was drawn towards:
Other controversial Trump statements he later clarified
- Trump denies mocking disabled reporter
- Trump backtracks on Iran video
- Trump backs down on abortion amid outcry
- Trump denies menstruation Kelly remark
- Trump’s email hacking remarks ‘sarcasm’
And this sorry specimen of a human being is still in the running for President. Worse still, the sorry specimens who support him give him a good chance of winning. And Rudy Giuliani – the guy who was New York’s mayor at the time of 9/11 – has gone right down in my estimation, as he is a rabid Trump supporter.
When you think how rapidly the world has changed during the last 12 months or so – IS atrocities, Brexit, Trump, and countless others around the globe – it is frightening to contemplate what might happen in the next 12.
I can’t be doing with the Olympics. You don’t know who is competing honestly and who is… well, getting a bit of outside assistance from the pharmaceutical industry. For some countries, the latter course of action would appear to be more or less mandatory if recent news reports are anything to go by.
However, I did notice this story today. It concerns the men’s 10m synchronised diving competition, in which GB won a bronze medal. As the name suggests, the participants in this sport are not singular in relation to each country – they’re plural. You see, it wouldn’t be called “synchronised” if there was only one of them. The upshot is that two divers dive off a platform, do stuff while they’re falling – this is where the synchronised part comes in, you understand – and then hit the water together. The more synchronised they are, the better their score. And whatever the result, barring a complete cock-up by one of them, they are both equally responsible.
All of the foregoing is only true if you’re not a newspaper editor, though. You see, the GB pair who won the bronze medal consists of Tom Daley and Daniel Goodfellow. But in most of this morning’s newspapers – and as you’d expect, the Daily Mail was at the front of the queue – only photographs of Tom Daley were shown. Daniel Goodfellow’s mother is understandably upset over this, and well she might be.
In the BBC story I’ve linked to above, they quote “an expert” from the media – Bob Satchwell, from the Society of Editors – who makes the one comment (in bold) which appears so suddenly that it is guaranteed to mean exactly the opposite of what it says:
Often an editor will make a decision according to the space available, and in this case most likely needed something ‘tall and thin’.
I don’t think there’s anything more sinister than that.
Yes, Mr Satchwell. I’m absolutely certain that Tom Daley’s well-publicised lifestyle choice (which has hardly been out of the bloody newspapers since the last Olympics) didn’t enter into it, and it needed you to make that clear for everyone right out of the blue like that. The truth is that if it hadn’t been for all that coverage about Tom Daley’s sexuality over the last four years he wouldn’t have been singled out like this – his diving partner is just as photogenic. Tom Daley is what he is as far as media targets go because of the coverage of his private life – and because the world is currently trying its damnedest to show how tolerant it is. And that is somewhat more sinister than you suggest.
The saddest part is that the media and those loopy Olympics hangers-on are wetting themselves over what is only a bronze medal, after all (I know, I know – but let’s just be honest). The two people who should really should be proud and excited by it (because they won it) are Tom Daley and Daniel Goodfellow. Thanks to the Daily Mail and the rest ballsing it up because of their warped agenda, the event of a lifetime has been ruined for one of them.